NWN 2 Interview

Homelan conjured up an interview with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart to get the early dirt on NeverWinter Nights 2, a sequel which BioWare didn't seem too interested in making:

HomeLAN - First, how did Obsidian get the gig to develop Neverwinter Nights 2?

Feargus Urquhart - I hate to say luck, but in a lot of ways it was that with a bunch of hard work piled on. While we were at Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay that I was President of, we worked for many years with BioWare, who developed the first Neverwinter Nights. Adding to that, we almost published the game Nox which was developed by a small developer called Hyperion that then became EA Pacific (I think that is mostly what happened there) which lead me to meet the owner of Hyperion, Michael Booth. He in turn introduced me to John Hight, who worked with Michael at EA, who is now an Executive Producer at Atari and in charge of their D&D products. So, through our relationship with BioWare, my meeting with John Hight and our record of developing and producing great D&D titles, Atari offered the product to us to develop.